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The push to open access to scientific publications has seen some remarkable successes this year. After publishers appeared to overreach by pushing to revoke the US government's existing open access policy, researchers started boycotting one of the bill's backers. A competing bill was introduced that would compel more government agencies to make their work available via open access, and a similar White House petition has received over 25,000 signatures. Even the editor-in-chief of Nature now considers open access an inevitability.

Publishers that offer open access options need to recoup their costs without subscription fees, however, and had researchers pay for their publications with charges that are generally over $1,000. Now, a new open access journal is being launched that aims to turn the finances on their head. Researchers will only have to pay a one-time fee of $259 to gain lifetime publishing privileges in the journal, which will focus on biology research. Ars talked to the publisher, Peter Binfeld, to find out how the new peer-reviewed, biology-focused PeerJ will work.

Binfeld believes that open access to research has reached an inflection point. "It feels like we've turned a hockey-stick corner of a disruption curve, and open access is now picking up, and I think everyone can see that," he said. Unfortunately, open access publishing, though free for readers, costs researchers a lot of money. PeerJ is a "great opportunity to experiment with a different business model, a different payment model."

Binfeld was formerly at the open access publisher Public Library of Science managing its PLoS One journal, which charges its authors $1,350 to publish—and it's one of the cheaper PLoS journals (fees go up to $2,900 at other PLoS journals). PNAS, a traditional journal, charges roughly the same amount to provide open access to one of its papers, and that's on top of the usual per-page and per-figure fees charged for the print version.

All of which makes PeerJ's pricing model nothing short of jaw-dropping. For a one-time $99 fee, anyone can publish a single paper a year for life (although the first dozen authors on the paper all have to sign up). $259 buys any author a lifetime membership, with the ability to publish as many papers as they choose. Bottom line: for only a fraction of the cost of a regular publication, researchers can publish as often as they want.

"It flips the model from payment-for-publication to a membership model," Binfeld said, "where someone gets a membership for life and gets free publications thereafter."

A new approach

How can this possibly work? Binfeld's answer suggests that he has run the numbers carefully. Part of the solution relies on the dynamics of authorship: not everyone will publish all of their papers in PeerJ, and some people will publish a couple of papers and then leave research. Most papers in biology have multiple authors, too, which will help drive membership.

PeerJ has also figured out how to cut costs. The journal will use customized software to mange the article submission and peer review process, and journal content will be stored on Amazon's S3 service and presented to users via software running on EC2. For long-term archiving, the publication will be placed at the National Institutes of Health's PubMed Central archive. According to Binfield's partner, Jason Hoyt, they've got a couple of servers for internal use, but everything user-facing will run on Amazon's hardware.

"When you do all the math, the revenue works out," Binfeld said, "and the costs need to be kept as low as possible."

Other aspects that add to the costs of traditional journals, like news and commentary, will not make an appearance in PeerJ. The journal will follow PLoS one's model: research will be judged on the scientific validity of the experiments, and the journal won't focus on the probable impact or significance of the work. The plan is to ensure that review is completed within a month of the article's submission.

PeerJ's involvement can, at the authors' choice, also start well before a paper is submitted for review. The journal will run a preprint server where researchers can place drafts and works-in-progress—common practice in the physics community, but not yet popular among biologists. Binfeld says PeerJ hopes to make the practice more appealing by giving users fine-grained control over sharing, letting them limit who has access to papers prior to publication. Authors also get the chance to share the title and/or abstract, which Binfeld suggested can help authors claim precedence for being the first to report some results.

Although the pricing and open access are appealing, PeerJ's plan is really to build up a sense of community within the researchers who publish there. "By doing this," Binfeld said, "we will have a community of members, of peers, rather than a collection of one-off customers who publish a paper with us, and we charge them money, they leave, and we don't care about them, we don't see them again."PeerJ will try to leverage this sense of community—Binfeld referred to having "members in good standing" who were involved in peer review for the journal.

PeerJ also plans to do peer review a bit differently. Members won't get credit for any peer review they do anonymously, which is part of a plan to encourage an open peer review system. "We're trying to encourage open peer review, and that really has two aspects," Binfeld said. "You can openly provide your identity as a reviewer. The other end of open peer review is to provide the entire peer review history on the published paper, and we're going to encourage but not require both of them." (That history includes the reviewers' comments and any changes made in response to them.)

PeerJ is trying many new things at once, and it's not clear all of them will succeed. Still, the most radical change—the low price—is sure to attract some people who are willing to give it a try. The journal also has an excellent pedigree, with Binfeld's experience at PLoS paired with that of cofounder Jason Hoyt, who worked at community reference management site Mendeley. The team has also picked up the backing of open access aficionado Tim O'Reilly. So even if all their different endeavors don't pan out, the effort still has the potential to be disruptive.

Interesting initiative. I wish them well, although I'm not sure the world needs another journal, despite the honourable intentions of the founders.

I try to restrict my output to the more traditional journals; JBC, PNAS etc. simply because of the need to satisfy the dreaded impact factor requirements of my dept (i.e. anything below 5.0 is questioned). I suspect that PeerJ will have an uphill struggle in this regard.

Exactly. That is a real requirement at a lot of (most of?) research labs and institutes. Until these open access "journals" get up on the IF list and create some respect for themselves in the fields they are targeting, higher quality publications will not target them. I know, it's kind of a catch 22, but that's how it is. Also, this trial the article mentions (with acceptably-sounding prices) might work, who knows, but otherwise the current models (i.e. transferring the costs from the institution subscriptions directly onto authors) simply cannot work because of the sometimes hilarious prices.

At $99 per author for the first twelve authors this actually works out to only a small discount over PLoS One for large multi-author publications. ($1182 vs $1350). I guess they're assuming papers with giant author lists tend to come from labs with more funding? Or alternatively labs where publication costs are a real problem will be willing to prune people who were "on the bubble" about qualifying as a co-author from paper's byline.

The "every author has to sign up" scheme makes it less attractive. Costs should be on a per paper basis, not per author.If you consider typical publications in biology, you often have less than the mentioned dozen authors. And if you look closely, you usually have the lead author, a senior scientist and/or group leader (often professor) and a couple of contributing authors. Most often, only the senior scientists on the paper publish regularly. Even the lead author might not publish more than 3-5 papers in their whole career if they decide to leave science after graduation/thesis. And quite often, the contributing authors listed might be grad or even undergrad students, who did the grunt-work for the paper.This raises a lot of questions. Who will pay for the membership? Why should a group leader or funding organization pay for the lifetime membership of a grad-student, if he/she may only publish 1 or 2 papers in this particular journal during current funding period.This might lead to smaller author lists, or force students to pay for publication out of their own pockets. Or, it could lead to a smaller number of authors, denying credit to those unfortunate enough not having the required membership.

At $99 per author for the first twelve authors this actually works out to only a small discount over PLoS One for large multi-author publications. ($1182 vs $1350). I guess they're assuming papers with giant author lists tend to come from labs with more funding? Or alternatively labs where publication costs are a real problem will be willing to prune people who were "on the bubble" about qualifying as a co-author from paper's byline.

That's exactly what I thought. In our lab we often write master students or even undergrads on papers. Although they didn't actually "write" anything, many did the hard "grunt-work". So it's just fair to give them credit. With this payment system no one below doctoral candidate might make the list, since no one would throw funding at a lifetime membership of an undergrad.

Am I missing something in this debate? Platform Open Journal Systems (http://pkp.sfu.ca/?q=ojs) free, so why not make use of it? What they are trying to build is already done. No need to make authors pay.

The plan is to ensure that review is completed within a month of the article's submission.

Ha! Good luck with that!

Seriously, I think it is great that so many people are trying new things for scientific publishing. A lot of these models will fail simply because most new journals fail (except when they're Elsevier's; then they are put on life support and get bundled with decent journals). But I hope some of these will succeed.

Personally, I would like to see an added layer of refereeing to the arXiv, that way my papers can get a label ("correct", "probably wrong", "correct and important", "wrong and important", etc.) and I can skip regular journals altogether. The problem is how to get there: it is all about trust in the community, which does not happen overnight. There have been several attempts, but none have survived.

Finally, public refereeing is not going to take off. The system works because referees can be brutally honest (and sometimes idiots). Getting rid of anonymity undermines this, and will result in too many dodgy papers passing the review stage.

My papers (quantum physics) rarely come back from the editor within a month, but perhaps your field is different. ;-)

I noticed the optional character of open refereeing in the article. I have participated myself in a trial (quantalk.org, which is dead now) where anonymity was an option, and where the referee reports were published online. I felt that the public reports worked quite well (I think it improved the quality), but nearly all reviewers opted for anonymity, including myself. The site also allowed for third-party comments, which I think could really add to the way we do science. Some papers ended up with interesting discussions.

Interestingly, Google+ has come to serve this purpose a bit. I regularly hear about new papers from colleagues on there, and the hangouts are routinely used to give online research talks. This is where a membership model could add something as well, but I guess that's a whole new responsibility to take on.

I think you are right that a lot of these things are going to be quite field specific. For example, our form of Open Peer Review has been successfully pioneered by The EMBO Journal which claims a very high uptake (http://www.nature.com/emboj/about/process.html).

One extra thing which comes as a side effect of our membership model - if people choose to reveal their identity in the peer review process, then they will be able to build up reputation credit, hence incentivizing that behaviour. And finally, we will allow open comments on published papers (but that form of input has never been very successful in my experience)